A Culture of Fear

In places where life is reasonably ordered, the violence that rages in the Third World is masked by a propensity to integrate it in some favorite sequence of meaning. For those beholden to a vision of gradual progress, such violence is a temporary sickness, a malady of growth. To those who honor revolution, it is a phase of dialectics—the birth pang of the new. It is rarely, if ever, depicted as a terrifying impasse, as horror, a catastrophe of meaning. The politician’s speech, the jo...